


Red Flag

by vials



Category: The Honourable Schoolboy - John Le Carré
Genre: Gen, everyone is being themselves and Guillam is annoyed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-08
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-10-29 10:41:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10852302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials/pseuds/vials
Summary: Smiley is busy, Fawn is being himself, and Guillam just wants the whole thing to be over and done with. Maybe all his looking forward was what allowed so much to slip past him; whatever the reason, he's going to wish he paid attention to the warning signs.





	Red Flag

**Author's Note:**

> Set during the Hong Kong period in _The Honourable Schoolboy_.

Fawn was like a child, Guillam decided. An overgrown, highly murderous child who he would admittedly not like to take on in a fight, but would definitely bash around the ear and lock in a bedroom if he had half the chance. 

There had been a time where Guillam had wondered what about Fawn made everybody so afraid of him, because when he had started work at Brixton everybody and their mothers had spoken in hushed tones about Fawn – wait until you meet Fawn, you won’t be complaining about how dull it is once you’ve seen Fawn, don’t let Fawn hear you say that. Scalphunters twice the size of Guillam had adopted the same attitude, and Guillam had grown more frustrated by the day. He had been expecting Fawn to be one of those hulking sociopaths occasionally picked up, unfortunately unavoidably, for the messiest jobs. What he hadn’t been expecting was a tiny wisp of a thing with hair so long that he had to shake it out of his face, who would barely ever talk unless specifically addressed, and who otherwise communicated almost entirely in scowls, sniggers, and grins. 

Guillam had thought it had been a prank. Fawn had been dispatched on a job when Guillam had started, out in Europe entirely on his own, which was how he preferred to work best, according to everybody else. They had no idea when he would be back – general consensus had been when the job was done, and they would find Fawn back at Brixton one day, wandering silently around the halls and muttering to himself. So, Guillam had decided that everybody was having a laugh at the new boss’s expense, and that they had collectively decided to make Fawn into a myth, something that should be feared and avoided when in actual fact the man behind it all looked more like a schoolboy than anything else. Guillam hadn’t been convinced for an instant, and he sure as hell hadn’t been _scared_. Even Fawn’s odd behaviour didn’t throw him off; Guillam simply assumed that the strange young man was in on the joke himself. Gradually Guillam learned that no, the man was actually that strange, but he still didn’t see anything to be scared of.

And then he had had to spend a prolonged amount of time with Fawn, and he soon realised why men as large as they were had avoided him, and why he was sent on assignments alone, and how he had managed to terrify that rogue Ricki Tarr into submission. Fawn was like a child, but there was something so perverse underneath his childlike attributes – his fascination with the slightest things, his irritability when hungry or tired, his insistence on questioning why – that made the whole thing obscene. Guillam thought to himself that the second he got the hell out of Hong Kong, he was never stepping foot inside Brixton again, not so long as the demon Fawn was running around.

Even so, he felt ridiculous thinking it. Looking at Fawn now, curled up on a chair and waiting patiently for Smiley’s next reappearance, Guillam thought there wasn’t an intimidating thing about him. Slight and freckled, his posture not betraying the immense strength he packed in his small arms and upper body, he looked like a disgruntled teenager waiting for something to do to present itself. Every so often he would shift or sigh, but aside from those small distractions he had an uncanny ability to make himself vanish into a room, to become a part of the furniture as surely as the chair he was sitting on. With this in mind, Guillam thought he was probably supposed to notice the way Fawn’s sighing and shifting had become too constant to ignore – Fawn’s way of starting a conversation, he had learned – and Guillam had no intention of rising to it on a normal day but today he was honest to god trying to work, and there was a deliberate and almost malicious feel to Fawn’s movements. The man could move through any situation completely silently, creeping up on whoever he had his eye on with no warning at all; to be so audibly noticeable was not in Fawn’s nature even if he hadn’t been a scalphunter, and so Guillam was forced to assume that the only reason for its occurrence was to distract him. He would have loved to have been the kind of man to not allow such things to get a rise from him, and maybe in a different situation he would manage it, but that was not how things turned out.

“You know,” Guillam eventually said, speaking lowly because he was afraid that if he didn’t control the tone of his voice he would begin shouting, “if you’re bored, you can go somewhere else. There’s no need for you to wait on Smiley hand and foot like this. Go outside, get some sun, do _something_.”

Fawn grumbled to himself and shifted first one way and then the other, crossing his arms over his chest and then uncrossing them again, tugging at his hair and then letting his arms thump heavily to the side.

“I get it, it’s boring,” Guillam told him. “But you’re not the only one, and no one else is sulking. If you’re going to keep distracting me, go away. Cause trouble somewhere else.”

Fawn sniffed.

“Hungry,” he said.

“Then go and find some food. Christ, you’ve got money, don’t you?”

Fawn gave a non-committal shrug.

“Or do you expect someone to go and get it for you? Good Lord. How old are you, anyway? What do you do when you’re on your own?”

Fawn giggled though nothing was apparently funny, and for a few blissful minutes seemed satisfied with the frustration he had caused Guillam. It didn’t last long, however; Guillam got the impression that Fawn had timed how long it took him to get back on a train of thought, because no sooner had he managed it did the man start his shifting and sighing again. 

_Christ,_ Guillam thought, closing his eyes and hoping for strength. _I wish I could hit him. I wish I could stand a decent chance of giving him a good smack._

Even Guillam wasn’t stupid enough to make that mistake. He had seen others try it before, assuming they would be able to get a decent advantage over Fawn because of his apparently tiny size. Guillam had also seen that same tiny frame pick up a man twice his height and throw him clean across a room, so he knew when a battle was lost. It made sense, he thought. Fawn had the quiet confidence of a man who knew he would fare well in a fight. Perhaps that was why he didn’t care what lines he crossed or which faces he made at who, or maybe he really was completely unaware that such boundaries existed in the first place, as he so often appeared to be. 

He was about to tell Fawn exactly what he could go and do, in much more colourful language, when a door down the hall opened and Smiley re-emerged, as usual these days looking far too hot and very flustered. Fawn immediately sprang out of his chair, standing as though to attention, his eyes fixed solely on Smiley and allowing Guillam to roll his eyes with as much emotion as he could muster. Smiley solely approached them, drawing level with Fawn and stopping, and everybody was silent while Smiley removed his glasses, cleaned them, and replaced them. Once he had done so he blinked, looking around at first Fawn and then Guillam, as though he hadn’t noticed they were there before. 

“Am I interrupting?” he asked.

“You’re not the one interrupting,” Guillam said, shooting a meaningful look at Fawn, who still had his eyes firmly on Smiley.

“Ah,” Smiley said, pushing his glasses further up his nose. “Well. I can’t stay for long, I’m afraid. Busy today. I trust you two will be able to keep yourselves occupied until this evening.”

Guillam fought the urge to groan, and even Fawn looked a little disappointed, though he immediately went and sat in his chair again, as obedient as though the suggestion had been an order.

“I can find something,” Guillam said, before finding himself unable to resist another jab. “But I might have to send Fawn elsewhere.”

“Have you fed him yet?” Smiley asked absently, in such a matter of fact tone that Guillam physically felt the shock on his face.

“Excuse me?” he asked.

“Have you given him anything to eat?” Smiley asked, before turning slightly to address Fawn. “Have you eaten?”

“No, sir.” Fawn sounded almost normal when he addressed Smiley; Guillam became all the more convinced that he simply put on his disjointed speaking just to further unnerve. “Not yet, sir.”

“Go out and find something to eat,” Smiley said, before addressing Guillam again. “Both of you. Guillam, you know he’ll just sit there unless you tell him to go and eat.”

“I didn’t realise he was incapable of going himself,” Guillam replied, in a tone that nobody would describe as neutral. 

“It’s best to keep an eye on him,” Smiley said, again as though this were normal, and he wasn’t imploring Guillam to keep an eye on Fawn and keep him fed as though he were Smiley’s attack dog in body as well as name. “I must be off, though. I will see you here sometime in the evening. Hopefully there will be more news.”

He shuffled away down the hall, and Guillam immediately turned his glare to Fawn, who was again lounging all over the chair, nibbling at his nails and grinning as he did so. He met Guillam’s gaze and the nibbling paused; the grin widened. 

“You little sh—” Guillam began, but cut himself off and Fawn only began to giggle. “Get up. Come on. Do you want lunch or not?”

Still giggling, Fawn dragged himself to his feet as though he had all the time in the world. Guillam turned away from him and grabbed his coat down from the nearby hook – there was really no need for it, in Hong Kong’s weather, but he preferred to wear it than risk the sun burning every inch of skin it could find. Fawn didn’t seem to be affected by weather hot or cold, and darted ahead of Guillam down the hallway in just his shirtsleeves, registering no discomfort when they reached the humid street beyond.

He was like a cross between a human child and an untrained dog, Guillam thought, reassessing. He had the innate drive to annoy that a young child has, always wanting to push boundaries and rules to see how far they would stretch, but he had the untrained dog’s habit of picking a single person to latch on to and then acting as though disobedience never even crossed his mind. Guillam watched him moving up ahead, within shouting distance of Guillam but well out of his reach. He bounced this way and that, occasionally vanishing from view completely, only to show up coming from a nearby alleyway. Guillam thought it wouldn’t be outside the realms of imagination to picture him sniffing at bushes and lampposts, too. 

Later that week, when Guillam had the accelerator pressed to the floor as he steered the car away from a stunned boy with two broken arms, he would wish he had seen the warning signs that day. Perhaps he couldn’t blame himself entirely, because Fawn was small and his height blended in well to the local population and it all happened so quickly, but at the same time Guillam thought it wasn’t exactly promising for someone of his profession to have missed such an extreme act. One minute he had been walking, semi-aware of where Fawn had just reappeared some distance ahead of him, and then a gaggle of locals all staring at his height had briefly distracted him and in that single split second there had been a loud clatter and a yelp of pain, and Guillam started running towards it before he had even fully registered it.

He cleared the remaining distance in a few seconds and came across a suddenly chaotic scene. Several local women were screaming at Fawn in agitated Cantonese, and Fawn, for his part, looked utterly unrepentant. In front of him, in a pile of overturned rubbish bins and foul-smelling litter, lay a dazed man, somewhere in his twenties, and sporting an already noticeable lump on his forehead. Fawn stood over him, oblivious to the women crowding closer and shouting louder, looking down at the man with an expression that Guillam could only describe as pure malice.

Guillam almost grabbed Fawn’s arm to pull him away, but thought better of it at the last moment. He had seen what had happened to others who had made the mistake of grabbing Fawn when he was wired like this; broken wrists had been the best case scenario. One of the women had noticed him now and was yelling at him in broken English – _you, you take him, you go, he kill him_ – but he brushed her aside, putting himself between Fawn and the stunned young man on the ground.

“Fawn,” he said, warningly, and Fawn’s face seemed to cloud over for a moment before snapping back into a bored expression. Without saying anything, he turned away and vanished through the small crowd of people. Guillam quickly hurried after him, leaving the shouting behind, and saw that Fawn was now getting on as he had before, a short distance from Guillam and darting this way and that. 

Guillam quickened his pace slightly and caught up to Fawn, overtaking him and planting himself in the way again. Fawn stopped, sniggered, and then rested back on his heels, looking up at him.

“What the bloody hell was that?” Guillam hissed. He wanted to grab the man and shake him, anything to get that insolent little smirk off his face. “What did you do to him?”

“He went to take the money from my pocket,” Fawn said simply, and Guillam felt a flicker of frustration at the fact that it hadn’t been over nothing, or at the very least over some perceived slight and not an actual annoyance. “I made sure he would think twice next time.”

“Was there really any need for _that_?” Guillam shot back instead; it was the only thing he could fairly focus on. “Could you not have just slapped his hand away? Did you have to lay him up with a concussion?”

“I was hungry,” Fawn replied simply, as though that settled it. He tried to dart around Guillam but he moved, blocking his path again.

“We don’t all start throwing people into bins because we’re _hungry_ , Fawn,” he said, and Fawn looked up at him, bored again. 

“Why not?” he asked, and slipped around Guillam. This time, Guillam let him go.


End file.
